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Griffey and Giambi Head Back Home in Twilight

Ken Griffey Jr., left, at a Mariners news conference and Jason Giambi at the Athletics' camp. Both players returned to where they started their careers. Credit
Left, Charlie Riedel/Associated Press; Eric Risberg/Associated Press

PEORIA, Ariz. — At baseball’s heart lies one simple goal: to leave home and then return. Straying’s perils are instantly dispelled on contact with the place once left.

Ken Griffey Jr. and Jason Giambi, having squared that circle more than 2,700 times, are rounding into more terra firma this spring. Nine years after leaving for his home of Cincinnati, Griffey is rejoining the Seattle Mariners — a franchise he breathed life into throughout the 1990s. Giambi, meanwhile, is returning to his old Oakland sandbox after seven turbulent years in New York.

Their greener pastures had been more like minefields. So Griffey and Giambi exhaled a bit last week when slipping on not just their old uniforms, but a sense of normalcy that all of baseball can use about now.

“I was raised in Cincinnati, but I grew up here,” Griffey said Saturday at his welcome-back unveiling at the Mariners’ camp here. A few miles away at the Athletics’ complex in Tempe, Giambi said of his Yankees interlude: “I feel like I was away at college and am coming home. The bed feels just a little bit better.”

Griffey’s exuberance lighted up fields throughout the American League. As far as Seattle is concerned, he will always be the 19-year-old what-me-worry prodigy who smashed 500-foot homers and giddily scaled fences. Old-time managers like Sparky Anderson might have complained about Griffey wearing his hat backward, but his charisma and popularity helped keep baseball in Seattle. The most significant play in Mariners history is Griffey’s first-to-home dash to win a 1995 playoff series against the Yankees.

“When Ken came back from an injury that year and helped us stage that great comeback to win the division, that built Safeco Field,” Chuck Armstrong, the Mariners president, said in reference to the amenity-packed stadium Seattle moved to in mid-1999. “We might have gone the way of the Sonics.”

Griffey averaged 53 homers and 143 runs batted in from 1997 through 1999, winning gold gloves in center field each year. But he longed to play in Cincinnati, where his father, Ken Sr., had starred for the Reds and where he had attended high school. The Mariners granted his request to be traded there; upon arrival in Cincinnati, Griffey said: “I’m finally home. This is where I’m happiest.”

Griffey did not necessarily stay happy — or healthy, which was most of the problem. He missed more than 250 games because of various injuries from 2002 through 2004, leading frustrated Cincinnati fans to occasionally boo him. As he played out his time there — last season ended with two months on the Chicago White Sox — Griffey’s career was clearly split into two halves: Seattle’s fairy tale and Cincinnati’s fable.

“I had my ups and downs, it was a learning experience, you name it,” Griffey said. “I learned a lot about who I am.”

Griffey decided last week that at his 39-year-old core, he was a Mariner. He received an attractive offer from the Atlanta Braves, which would allow him far more opportunity to see his wife and three kids who live outside Orlando, Fla., but returning to Seattle was too tempting a bookend. He heeded his father’s advice: “No team’s going to treat you like your first.”

Giambi’s stints in Oakland will be less bookends than buns of an In-N-Out cheeseburger, of which he downed more than his share from 1995 through 2001 as the beloved ringleader of the raucous A’s. Giambi drove a purple Lamborghini and longed for a boat on which, he said, “I can light my hair on fire and do margaritas at 110 miles an hour.”

As for the double-cheeseburgers he downed on game days, he once joked: “The bad thing is when the guy behind the counter doesn’t even ask for your order anymore. He just knows.”

But Giambi bolted Oakland for a gluttonous $120 million contract to play for the Yankees, who prefer their players as straight and true as their pinstripes. Giambi cut his car-wash hair and played reasonably well his first two seasons, but collapsed on the field and off in 2004. Some light as to why came that winter when his testimony in a federal steroids investigation leaked, indicating his power came from more than those burgers.

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“You always learn most about yourself when you hit that lowest point, and I hit a low point there in New York,” said Giambi, who publicly apologized. “But I worked my way out of it, battled back and wound up winning the fans back.”

Giambi said he wanted to remain in New York for this season, but his service ended with the Yankees’ $180 million purchase of slugger Mark Teixeira. (“That’s what the Yankees do — I was that guy seven years ago,” Giambi said.) Like Griffey and Atlanta, Giambi had interest from the Tampa Bay Rays but decided to, quite literally, let his hair hang down like it used to.

His regrown beard has several patches of gray and he is a dozen years older than many teammates, but Giambi at 38 is starting to feel like 28 again.

“The cool thing is, I feel almost like a rookie here because I don’t know anybody other than Eric Chavez,” Giambi said. “So it’s been kind of fun getting that rebirth.”

A less fun reminder of Giambi’s past will come next month, when he must testify at the San Francisco perjury trial of Barry Bonds. Giambi said him leaving the A’s temporarily would not be a major distraction, because baseball has made peace with his past.

“Everybody, I think, knows my situation,” he said. “I’m not there to offer any more, as far as I know. I’m not really worried about it at all.”

As comfortable as Seattle and Oakland uniforms are for Giambi and Griffey, returning to the nest has not befitted some of the game’s greats. Willie Mays went back to New York from San Francisco for two clumsy and inglorious seasons with the Mets through 1973; two years later, Hank Aaron returned to his Milwaukee Braves roots by lumbering through two bloated years with the Brewers.

Griffey and Giambi should have more success during their second go-rounds with their first teams. Griffey, expected to play left field and be a designated hitter, hit 18 home runs last year on a bad knee and should provide left-handed power in the middle of the Mariners’ order — health permitting.

“I may not hit 50, 40 or 30 home runs, but I can do the little things like moving runners over that don’t show up in the box score,” Griffey said, sounding nothing like the fearsome slugger he once was. Ever playful when he wants to be, Griffey then joked how he would push Ichiro Suzuki for the team lead in infield singles.

If nothing else, Griffey’s return will re-energize fans after a dreary 101-loss season. Armstrong said that the Mariners sold 19,000 more tickets than normal in the two days after Griffey’s signing.

Giambi hit 32 home runs with 96 R.B.I. and a .373 on-base percentage for the Yankees last year, and could help form an imposing 3-4 combination in Oakland with the fellow import Matt Holliday, formerly of the Colorado Rockies. Giambi might clog the bases, but he will clear them occasionally, too.

As Griffey and Giambi round into home, they and their many fans will have to adjust to their new skill sets. As Giambi put it through his weathered whiskers, he can still drink plenty of beer, “but I don’t think I’ll play as well the next day.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Griffey and Giambi Head Back Home in Twilight. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe